Experimental Study of Heat Absorbing Packed Bed Regenerator for Space Heating for Industrial Purpose

Solar radiation is available for limited hours only in a single day. As a result it is often necessary to use a storage system to store this limited hour-s available solar radiation, so that it can be used for various applications. Space heating is one of the most important demands of people in winters. Therefore there is a need of a storage system which provides heating in off shine hours during winter. Present work deals with the experimental study of various vital thermal energy storage system parameters such as packed bed size, heat absorbing material particle diameter and number of beds. Besides this, mass velocity of air in charging and discharging of heat absorbing packed bed, pressure drop across bed, cycle time of charging and discharging the packed bed are also studied through experimental setup and validation is carried out through theoretically numerical based equations. Based on the optimization, rock bed length 1.5 m, diameter of rock bed 0.1 m, rock particle diameter 0.03 m, number of beds 2 and mass velocity of working fluid in charging and discharging 0.0125 kg/m2-s, 0.00796 kg/m2-s respectively, has been proposed.